Today I #GiveThanks for Unexpected Attention

​Y'all, the internet is not a safe place. On the 24th I received three identical form entries on my site from [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] (all from IP address 212.102.37.238, Zurich, Switzerland).

[Quote]

Your reputation and business are at stake!

We on your behalf in the message your website address christopherrandallnicholson.com and your contact information (including in social. Networks and messengers) will send:

+ on 15,897,318 sites, threats with insults to site owners, US residents, Europeans, LGBT and BLM.

+ 790,000 messages to bloggers with threats and insults

+ 2 367 896 public figures and politicians (from the USA and Europe) with threats and insults

+ 70,000 negative reviews about you and your website christopherrandallnicholson.com

+ 23 467 849 contact forms of sites with threats and insults

+ 150,000 emails messages to people with disabilities with threats and insults, many of them will definitely sue you

+ 57000 emails of messages to veterans with threats and insults, FOR THIS YOU WILL BE EXACTLY SITTED

Following from all of the above, you will get a lot of losses:

+ an abuse from spam house, amazon and many webmasters (for spam, insults and threats) will come to your site christopherrandallnicholson.com, as a result, your domain will be banned and blacklisted

+ people will sue you because you threatened and humiliated them

+ in court you will not prove anything, everything will look as if you did it all, MOST YOU WILL GO TO PRISON

+ internet will be inundated with negative reviews about you and your website christopherrandallnicholson.com

+ threats and reprisals from BLM and LGBT community members, in fact, these are dangerous community guys

Total: you will lose your business, all your money, you will spend on lawyers and compensation for court decisions, you will go to jail, your life will turn to hell ...

We already have everything ready to launch all of the above, but we decided to give you a chance to avoid all this, you can buy off a small amount of money.

Make a payment, transfer 0.39 Bitcoins to this address

1JDYfBMP3vg8TcuFuwSHc1Wop3rREqupC4

We are waiting for the transfer from you until November 27, on Saturday November 28, if payment does not come from you, we will begin to destroy your business and you along with it.

[Close quote]

So, let me get this straight... since the deadline has passed and I didn't do anything, he's going to advertise my painfully obscure website, for free, to 42,800,063 people? Oh no! And then nobody will believe me even though I have three records of him spelling out his evil plot in excruciating detail? Oh no! It's really not worth the effort to dissect every self-explanatory reason why this scam is unbelievably stupid, so I'll just focus on one more. I believe I've been very vocal about some of the people I heartily dislike, and BLM and the LGBT community have never been on the list. Not once. If the scammer had done a modicum of research to make his scam just a teensy bit less unbelievably stupid, he would have instead threatened to send threats and insults and threats with insults to All Lives Matter, police unions, bootlickers, anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, Trump cultists, and Latter-day Saints who think their political views are the gospel. Even though most of those are the same person. One thing creeps me out a little, though - the reference to politicians from Europe. I've never told a soul about my profound distaste for Angela Merkel, so how did he know? I hope it was a lucky guess.

I don't know if there's a connection, but the same day I received this from one "Tom Sawyer", [email protected], (IP address 172.58.173.227, South Bradenton, Florida).

[Quote]

There’s no such thing as high functioning autism you sick [redacted]. God said retards should be punished. Mormons are disgusting. You’re a retarded white supremacist. You’re ugly. I consume cock.

[Close quote]

Oh no. Someone I've never met in South Bradenton, Florida, who obviously has fewer brain cells than fingers, doesn't like me very much. I may never recover from this crushing blow to my self-esteem.

I don't know if there's a connection, but someone hacked my Spotify account. They were apparently logged into it from another device, and every time I came back after a break from using it, it was playing some random single from 2019 or 2020, from some artist with no other tracks and no biographical information on the internet. Sometimes they were added to my Library or Liked Songs without my permission. An obvious money-making scheme, though from what I've heard about what Spotify pays artists, surely there are better money-making schemes available.

I don't know if there's a connection, but someone allegedly named Pablo Salcedo from Don Torcuato, Buenos Aires, Argentina hacked my Facebook account, sent himself a friend request, created a page called "Super discount toy shop", added himself as an admin on my Ads Manager, and ran ads for a post on the page which linked to a fraudulent website that purported to sell heavily discounted Nintendo Switches for Black Friday (which will, of course, fail to arrive). I know exactly who did this - or I know what profile he was using, at least, which may very well be fake. Yet Facebook provides no option whatsoever to report this. I can report that "someone" hacked me and take steps to secure my account (which I already did), but I can't report that this exact person is the one who hacked me and used my profile to run a scam, and that he should be removed from Facebook and reported to local law enforcement. I'm disputing the ad charges now - he actually used his own credit card, which was thoughtful, but I stupidly removed it from my Ads Manager so now Facebook is going to try to bill me on Monday and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay it.

Really, Pablo, is this what they taught you at Universidad Tecnológica Nacional Argentina and Instituto María Reina (Lomas del Mirador)? Surely you could put your hacking skills to better use, like making Trump's Twitter account say "Me gustan Mexicanos y Musulmanes."

For three weeks I had a sore throat and occasional dry cough that fluctuated in severity from day to day and hour to hour. At first I thought nothing of it, since the cold air and pollution often afflict me like that, but when it wouldn't go away I became concerned. I got tested twice. The first time I was told to stick the swab up my nose until I felt "resistance". I wish they had defined "resistance" more clearly, because I suppose I did feel a bit for just a moment but then the swab kept going until it felt like it would touch my brain, and it came out pink. A few days later when I got tested again in case the first test was wrong, they just said stick it up about an inch, and that direction was a lot easier to follow and a lot less unpleasant. I was then also able to participate in a blood test for Quansys Biosciences, which is planning to mass-produce a mail-order blood test kit and wanted to see if the instructions were clear. I was given a $20 gift card to "Stacked", a pancake restaurant that I've never been to and won't go to as long as Utah's case load continues to skyrocket.

​For Thanksgiving this year, I stayed home and ate ravioli by myself because I'd like for my grandparents to still be alive next Thanksgiving. There were some people in town I could have hung out with, but I've seen how seriously most college students don't take social distancing and mask wearing when they aren't being forced to, so no. That's okay. I really enjoyed the time off school and work and I really enjoyed my roommates not being here for most of the day. Will things be better by Christmas? Not likely.